Religious prejudice in Mississippi may take a new turn after police arrested Jagjee Singh, a long-distance truck driver, for driving with a flat tire. The Sikh man was mocked and told to remove his religious attire, specifically a small, sheathed ceremonial sword sewn into his trousers. Later in court, the judge ordered Singh removed because the judge didn’t like Singh’s turban, also religious attire. After that, the Department of Justice investigated, and the county’s policy now declares that religious discrimination includes allowing a person to wear head covering with a religious reason. The ACLU is now requesting an investigation of county law officers on harassment charges and plans another one on the judge and his actions.

Another problem keeping the wall between church and state comes from Kansas where Citizens for Objective Public Education (COPE) thinks that science classes are teaching evolution as a religious belief. The group claims that public schools “promote a ‘non-theistic religious worldview’ by allowing only ‘materialistic’ or ‘atheistic’ explanations to scientific questions.” COPE argues that by teaching evolution “the state would be ‘indoctrinating’ impressionable students in violation of the First Amendment.” To COPE, any secular teaching is a rejection of religion.

Physicist Victor Stenger pointed out that U.S. 15-year-olds are 29th among developed nations in this area. In 33 countries, only Muslim Turkey has a lower belief in evolution than the United States. In the meantime, our schools are producing a generation of science illiterates. Stenger attributes this ignorance to the threat in fundamentalist Christianity to the belief in the inerrancy of scripture.

The idea that climate warming is a hoax comes from the Christian belief that God would never allow this to happen. In 2009, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, argued against climate change because God told Noah he would never again destroy Earth by flood (Gen 8:21-22). According to Shimkus:

“The earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood. . . . I do believe God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect.”

An organization called The Cornwall Alliance for The Stewardship of Creation recently issued “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming.”

“We believe Earth and its ecosystems–created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence–are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.”

“We deny that Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric chemistry. Recent warming was neither abnormally large nor abnormally rapid. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human contributions to greenhouse gases is causing dangerous global warming.”

“We deny that carbon dioxide–essential to all plant growth–is a pollutant. Reducing greenhouse gases cannot achieve significant reductions in future global temperatures, and the costs of the policies would far exceed the benefits.”

According to Stenger, “corporate profits are the force behind the denial of climate change. But denialism would not be so effective if its proponents were not able to exploit the antiscience inherent to religious faith.”

Throughout history, religion has been used as a tool of the powerful to keep the masses in line. This practice was unleashed on the government when George W. Bush was appointed president. Increasingly, religious groups manipulate people to work against their best interests in both health and economic well being primarily by lying about well-established scientific findings.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN, past presidential candidate, is one of the politicians who use Christianity to her politics. In an interview with Jan Markell (aka crackpot radio host), she explained that Hillary Clinton won’t be elected president because of the Biblical story of David and Goliath: “All David needed was one smooth stone to fell the giant. It wasn’t the stone, it wasn’t David, it was the strong right arm of a Holy God.” According to Bachmann, if “we repent, if we cry out to God, we have no idea what the Lord God will do for us in 2016.” Christians like Bachmann believe their god follow their orders.

Democrats’ “mind control experiment” is the reason for same-sex marriage, according to Colorado state senator Kent Lambert. The GOP legislator made his allegations on ex-Navy chaplain “Dr. Chaps” Gordon Klingenschmitt’s Internet TV show “Pray In Jesus Name.” Lambert may not know that the state doesn’t have a “homosexual marriage” law—just one for civil unions. He also mourned the loss of privacy because 6-year-old Cory Mathis is now permitted by law to use the girls’ bathroom at her school because she is transgender. If he wants to do something about privacy, he might want to check into the surveillance of the National Security Agency.

Italy has provided some great images, compliments of a pasta maker and the pope. Buitoni posted this image on its website after the Barilla Group stated that gays could eat another kind of pasta if they didn’t like the company’s bigotry.

After the Vatican threatened legal action if Gonzalo Orquinn’s exhibit ”Trialogo” of same-sex couples kissing in churches opened at the Galleria L’Opera, Huffington Post kindly put some his photos in an article.

Fox network host Bill O’Reilly, known for his books about the deaths of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, has a new book called Killing Jesus in which he writes that taxes were the reason for Jesus’s death. This one, like the others, is riddled with misrepresentations, perhaps because God told O’Reilly to write the book in a dream, according to the author. Note: O’Reilly gets the credit for the book, but his co-author did all the research.

The good news for this Sunday: When Sara Elizabeth Sheppard heard her high school economics teacher comparing atheism to smoking cigarettes, she used her cell phone to take his lecture about this in class. He claimed that atheism was against human nature and that “the mind rejects the concept of atheism” just like the body rejects smoking. The week after this lesson, he advocated prayer for a positive state of mind. Sheppard gave the recordings to the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) which contacted her school district. The essay that she wrote about her experience won her fourth place of $500 in a FFRF Scholarship Essay contest.

Sheppard said, “I had a few friends in the same class that were angry with me and said I destroyed his freedom to religion, but in reality his actions were unconstitutional and were not related to economics at all. This was economics class, not Sunday school.”